May 11, 2008
Mum
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde* wrote: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”
My teenage son and I were single parenting at one stage in our lives. He was good about leaving notes around for me. One of my fondest on one Mother’s Day was a Mother’s Day card. I’d already been through several of our culture’s also-ran Father’s Days with him and his siblings over the years, but nothing ever quite touched me as much about these commercialized “sentiments” until this gesture.
Oscar Wilde was right, at least, about men. The most persuasive ground for the Virgin Birth is Karl Barth’s contention that it shows God’s considerable displeasure with the way we men had previously handled our privileged lives as stewards and the fact that God, thanks all the same, can manage things quite as well — or better — altogether without us.
Apparently, we’re yet to get the point. We’re either too blind or just sublimely too intimidated to discover Gloria Steinem’s pungent aphorism that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
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*Reported in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac 11 May 2008.
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